The lit girl

With a little sister like Tara Palmer-Tomkinson it's hard to make a name for yourself. But Santa Sebag-Montefiore has chosen novels rather than parties as the road to fame and fortune. Christa D'Souza meets her.

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By Christa D'Souza

12:00AM GMT 24 Feb 2001

IF there is one thing Santa Sebag-Montefiore (or Santa Sebag-Montefiore-Palmer-Tomkinson, as she would be known if she had kept her maiden name) would like everyone to be clear about, it is that she is not the goddaughter of Prince Charles. All right, he and Camilla Parker Bowles were guests at her wedding and yes, she and her husband, Simon, are frequent guests at Highgrove, but that's as far as it goes.

Literary gal: Santa Sebag-Montefiore

That's the trouble, though, with being a Palmer-Tomkinson. Everybody has always got such preconceptions. And that royal connection (Santa's parents, Charles and Patti, met the Prince in Klosters, Switzerland, when she was about six) has always slightly eclipsed the family name. Oh, and then there's her sister, you know who. 'I used to sign cheques in Waitrose and they'd always go. "Ooh! Are you any relation to Tara?" says Santa. 'But now I'm married and I've changed the name on my chequebook, that doesn't happen so much any more.'

It is a bitter grey morning in London and we are standing in the hallway of the spacious, rather grown-up flat overlooking Battersea Park into which Santa, 31, and her dashing historian of a husband, Simon Sebag-Montefiore - author of Prince of Princes: the Life of Potemkin and My Affair With Stalin - have just moved.

It is well known in social circles how Santa converted from Christianity to Judaism before she married Simon in 1998 ('Being Jewish meant so much to Simon, it would have driven a wedge between us [if I hadn't]'), but besides the antiquarian book of ancient Jewish warfare, lying open on top of a cabinet, and some menorah candles just visible in the living-room, there is nothing to distinguish the setting from any other prosperous Sloane's residence.

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Statuesque and radiant-skinned, in black leggings and JP Tod's, Santa's neat five-month pregnancy can be detected only if you look at her sideways. She leads the way to the high-tech kitchen which is small but scrupulously tidy.

Pinned to the fridge is a picture of her great friend, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and poised on the kitchen table is the laptop on which she wrote her first novel, Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree, 'a sweeping epic of forbidden love', as the cover describes it, and written in fond memory of the year she spent teaching English on a sprawling estancia in Argentina.

The novel draws on her own experience, but is also born of her mother's heritage. Patti is of Anglo-Argentine extraction, born in Argentina and then brought up in Chile and Brazil. She was sent to boarding school in Britain, however, and met the Hampshire farmer Charles Palmer-Tomkinson while working as a chalet girl in Klosters.

Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree is a kind of Anglo-Argentine Dynasty, with no rude bits at all but lots of smouldering Latin boys swinging their polo mallets about. The very readable story centres on a tempestuous beauty named Sofia Solanas who incurs the wrath of her noble Argentine family after having an affair with her cousin, Santi. She then goes to London in self-imposed exile until a family tragedy brings her home.

Santa started writing the novella (as she intended it) six years ago, while working in the PR department of the outfitters Swaine Adeney, and then for the society jeweller Theo Fennell. As the writing progressed (she decided to leave PR and went to work as a shop assistant in Farmacia Santa Maria Novella, the Chelsea perfumery), few knew of her secret ambition to become a novelist, except for her beloved Simon. It was he, she insists, who kept encouraging her to write.

'Without Sebag I would never have plucked up courage to write,' Santa admits happily. 'I had come from quite a sheltered, Sloaney background and he made me see life in a different way; besides introducing me to different kinds of literature - he gave me Anna Karenina to read on our honeymoon - he taught me to look beyond the surface.'

When the book was finished in 1999, Sebag (as Santa calls him) had to give his wife another encouraging push. 'I thought books were his department,' says Santa, who at the time had just accepted a cushy job in the special-events department of Ralph Lauren. 'I just knew people were going to say, "Oh, she's only writing because he's writing!" '

But Santa acquiesced, found herself an agent through a friend working at Random House, and in May 1999 sent the manuscript to four publishers under a fake name thought up by Sebag. The reason behind that decision, however, was entirely her own. 'I sent it out under the name of Miss X,' she says simply, 'because I was worried that if I sent it out under the name Palmer-Tomkinson it would have got out that "Tara's sister" was trying to do a book.' One can see her point. At the time, the name Palmer-Tomkinson was appearing all over the place due to Tara's very public battle with illegal substances (more of which later).

Latin roots: Santa on her gap year in Argentina

It was a wise judgment, because to Santa's bitter disappointment, the manuscript was rejected by no fewer than three agents. Just as she was about to give up, however, a letter arrived from agent Jo Frank at AP Watt who declared an interest, but insisted that it be turned into a proper 600-page novel.

Buoyed by the positive response, Santa immediately launched herself into expanding the book, furtively writing a chapter here and there in a spare lunch break and racing out of the Ralph Lauren offices at 5pm sharp in order to squeeze in more writing. The hard work and subterfuge paid off. That year she found herself in the enviable position of being fought over at auction by six publishing houses, and ended up signing a two-book deal with Hodder & Stoughton, who agreed to pay her an advance of £150,000. 'I gave in my notice that same day,' she says, 'and it was the best feeling.'

Santa was born in 1970 and named partly after a barley crop called 'Senta' which did particularly well that year. Brought up in a beautiful rambling Georgian house (nicknamed 'PT Towers' by Tara in her former Sunday Times column and 'Lowgrove' by others because of the frequency with which Prince Charles visited), Santa and her siblings (her brother James is 32, Tara, 29) led a charmed childhood, spending every Christmas skiing in Klosters, weekending at Sandringham and playing in the gardens of Birkhall and Highgrove.

Maddeningly popular with pupils and teachers alike, good at games (she played lacrosse for England) and reasonably good at languages, Santa was made head of house at Sherborne - the boarding school she and Tara attended - on reaching the sixth form. Predictably, some of her more vivid memories are of being hauled into the headmistress's office almost every day to hear the latest of her naughty little sister's exploits.

'My heart would sink,' she recalls. 'Yet again, she'd be caught having a smoke in the games room, or dyeing her hair pink on the roof or talking through prep. She was always talking through prep. It was a bit of a pain in the neck.'

Already a budding novelist, penning little hand-written romances for her friends about their crushes from the neighbouring boys' school ('it was all very Mills & Boon, usually set in high humidity in some mosquito-ridden jungle'), Santa knew very early that she wanted to write books, but knew there were a few barriers she had to cross before getting something published.

'I couldn't write about sex because I'd never had a relationship - I'd only kissed a few people at dances - besides which it would have been intensely embarrassing having my parents read anything like that.' Her first foray into the world of fiction, therefore (just before the tragic avalanche accident in Klosters in which her mother was badly injured and Prince Charles's aide, Hugh Lindsay, was killed), was as a children's writer.

However, the book she wrote - which was based on a family who had lived in the same house for 500 years 'with lots of portraits of great-great-grandfathers on the walls' - was instantly rejected by HarperCollins on the grounds of being far too 'upper-class'. 'They wondered why I needed a big, fat cook who was a live-in when she could so easily have done three days a week,' recalls Santa.

Putting her writing career aside, she then accepted a place at Exeter University to read modern languages and, rather more pivotally, spent her gap year in Argentina in 1989. 'Unlike my brother and sister, I'd always been fascinated by my Latin heritage,' she explains fervently, 'and I worked hard at Spanish at school because I so wanted to belong to that side of my family. It sounds rather contrived, the way I so eagerly picked up on colloquialisms, but I didn't care. I threw all my inhibitions aside.

I just wanted to be like them, to belong. I had the most amazing time of my life, but of course when I went back again for a visit, the whole dynamic had changed, I didn't belong any more. It was very disillusioning? I suppose the point of writing the book was because I wanted to put back feelings of loving, leaving and then loving on a different level.'

When Santa met Simon, 35 (her previous boyfriend was a computer analyst from Argentina), she was a shop assistant and had just moved into Tara's flat off the Fulham Road.

'I lived with a star,' as she rather helplessly puts it. 'I'd be out all day, she'd be out all night. The only time we'd really meet was around 7am in the bathroom when I'd be putting on my make-up and she'd be taking hers off.

'Simon came into the shop because he'd been told by a friend of mine, "This girl could be right for you, so you should check her out." Funnily enough, I don't remember meeting him at all.'

Then, at a dinner party, she sat next to the historian Andrew Roberts, a colleague and friend of Simon's, who told her they would be absolutely perfect for each other because they were the only two people he knew who could remember the words to Evita off by heart. Roberts then instructed Simon to invite the 'leggy shopgirl' out on a date.

'He asked me out for lunch and I was absolutely smitten,' recalls Santa, flaring her delicate nostrils and blushing prettily at the memory. 'But when the coffee came I went to the loo and came back to find him looking in my handbag. As he was opening my wallet and going through my credit cards, I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "I just wanted to check you are who you say you are." Well, it was only months later that I realised why he was doing that. You see, he'd spent so much time going out on dates with these dubious Russian? well, adventuresses, I suppose one would have to call them - who would go by the name of Anastasia one week and Natasha the next - that he was always very suspicious of people's identities.'

What? Meaning Simon Sebag-Montefiore, the ultra-savvy, ultra switched-on Cambridge-educated journalist, thought she might have been a spy? 'Oh, I don't know what he was doing,' sighs Santa with typical disingenuousness. 'I agree, it does sound rather absurd, doesn't it, like he was trying to nick something! But then, why would he have reason to believe I was who I said I was? After all, I was just a shopgirl standing behind the counter at Santa Maria Novella. No one knew what I looked like - Tara was the one who was so well known.'

It's rather strange now, having met both sisters. On a physical level they are quite alike, with their rangy bodies and determined jaws. And yet on an emotional level they could not be more different. If Tara is the sinner, then Santa is most definitely the saint, with a kind of goldenness about her aura. All of which Tara must be sick to death of hearing by now.

'Oh, no. I always tell everyone my sister is a saint,' says a cheery Palmer-Tomkinson on her mobile, a couple of days later, 'but that's because she's happy with herself. Just like my father. In fact, we call them both "white spirits" at home.

'Santa's always been incredibly caring to me, too,' she goes on. 'I remember the times when I was terribly underweight and I'd go to the loo and I'd hear her padding up the stairs (she never knew this) to hear if I was getting sick because she was so worried about me. And I remember when I got off the plane from rehab to meet my family round the back of the airport (they'd let me skip customs because of all the press waiting outside, so we all gathered in some cargo lot), Santa had taken all my teddies from my bed and put them in the car.'

'I did feel desperately protective of her,' says Santa, 'especially when things got really bad, like the rehab thing and the broken romance. It's slightly different now that I'm married, but being part of her life does inevitably affect me and I always had mixed emotions about her "fame". The press was unpleasant but she did choose that life and you can't have it when it suits you and then think you can switch it off. The really great thing about Tara, though, is that she can laugh at herself.'

Already finished with her second novel (The Butterfly Box, another smouldering yet tits-and-bums-free epic, this time set between Chile and England), Santa is keen to finish her third before she gives birth ('because I've heard how your brain turns to mush straight after you have a baby'). As yet untitled, and to my mind, the most compelling-sounding of the three, it takes place in the English quarter of Buenos Aires, the place where Patti grew up.

'You suddenly leave all this Spanish architecture and find this place called Hurlingham with all these little Surrey houses bordered by hedges,' says Santa enthusiastically. 'Then there's this little wooden-panelled club with portraits of the Queen hanging up. My mother remembers going there to read English magazines such as Country Life.

'That's what these English families who'd moved out to Argentina did. They'd spend all their spare time at the Hurlingham Club, socialising exclusively with each other. Since they all married each other they never spoke any Spanish either, except to their maids.'

By Santa's own admission she's no 'chick lit' star, having always been rather puzzled by how there's so much in the market about thirtysomethings wanting to find husbands but nobody's writing those wonderful Rosamunde Pilcher/Maeve Binchy, old-fashioned love stories any more.

'I'm just not very good at "modern" situations,' she says. 'In fact, my editor once said to me she'd have loved to know what my characters actually did for a living. I said, "Well, funnily enough, I don't really care. I'm better at describing people's relationships than what they do for a living. I just don't think my characters are the sort of people who have conversations over the photocopier.'

So far Santa's life has been remarkably blip-free compared with her sister's, unless you count her conversion to Judaism as one, which some of her acquaintances obviously did. During the wedding service in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in central London, for example, which was followed by a reception at the Ritz, one 'primitive Sloane' had the idle gall to shout out, 'Goddamit! The Jew won!' The family, displaying their typical grace, have invited him back to PT Towers since.

'Becoming Jewish hasn't taken away anything from my life,' shrugs Santa. 'If anything, it's added. We light candles together, the Friday-night dinners are fun... I was never a religious Christian anyway - I believed in God, not Jesus. And besides, what would we have done if I hadn't? Would he drag our child to synagogue classes on Saturday? Would I drag him or her to church on Sunday? What would we have done about our marriage ceremony?'

As for incorporating the religious conversion into one of her novels, she could not think of anything more boring. 'Fine, if I'd had a problem with it,' says the society girl who could go down in The Guinness Book of Records for her seeming lack of side, 'but it would only be interesting if there were obstacles, and there weren't.'

Who knows if the happy couple will ask Prince Charles to be a godfather. But, if he's worried about appearances, he'd be a fool to say no.

'Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree' (Hodder & Stoughton) by Santa Montefiore, is available from our retail partner, Amazon. Click here to order a copy online.